‘An utter failure of governance’: former Toronto Police Board chair criticizes Peel police’s 23.3 percent increase

The former chair of Toronto’s Police board is criticizing a Peel police budget increase that has been widely condemned as reckless and unnecessary, warning it will have “implications for police budget increases beyond Peel.”

Alok Mukherjee, who served in the role from 2005 to 2015 and has been actively involved in police governance across Ontario for two decades, said the 23.3 percent hike demanded by Peel’s Chief, Nishan Duraiappah, is “unheard of”, just a year after Peel police received a 14 percent increase last year. 

“I was absolutely flabbergasted,” he told The Pointer.

Mukherjee questions whether the police board was provided with any sort of analysis by an external expert, or a work plan justifying the size of increase for officers, or whether the board itself commissioned any review of the standard of service being provided by the police force. He said it is unclear if the board or the Chief are basing the budget demands on any objective information to arrive at the proposed additional 300 officers. 

Duraiappah offered few financial explanations of how the additional $144 million will be spent and no auditing to justify the scale of the demand, a trend over the five years since he took over the force and began bringing forward budgets critics have said are unsustainable and unjustified.

The increase will support the hiring of 300 officers, 10 communicators and 55 civilian positions. The Chief has not explained how that many officers can be hired, trained and onboarded in one year; it’s about five times the number, on average, that have been brought on annually over the last decade.  

The additional $144 million is more than the increase over ten years, between 2012 and 2022, when spending on police rose by 23.6 percent. 

Under Ontario’s Community Safety and Policing Act (CSPA), the overarching legislation that governs police forces and the boards that oversee them, boards are supposed to create a strategic plan that ensures a force’s policies and budget provide adequate policing for the population it patrols, with clear “quantitative and qualitative” performance objectives. There has been no explanation of how the Chief’s request for a 23.3 percent increase was supported by a detailed strategic plan, required as part of the board’s legal obligation, to align priorities and justify spending.

When the board approved the budget request in November, there was hardly any questioning about how the figure was reached, the absence of detailed financial analysis and auditing to show what was needed and how the money would be spent. 

Increasing Peel’s police force by 300 officers in a single year “without any plan, without any justification” is “huge”, Mukherjee said. The direct lack of accountability by the board to ensure these reports are presented and are done through a transparent process “says something about the political culture of the Region,” he added. “This budget and the fact that the board approved a huge increase, which the chief then said is the largest increase ever called for, raises serious questions about the board’s competence.”

“It seems to be an utter failure of governance.”

He is concerned that the reckless apathy of Peel’s board might influence other police forces around the province to circumvent proper governance.

“Aside from what it says about the police service, it raises serious questions about how effective the governance provided by the police services board is,” Mukherjee said. “It is absolutely unheard of that in two years, the police budget should increase by nearly 40 percent. There's no other program that I can think of that receives even 1/10 of an increase of this magnitude, and it is astounding for me that there's no scrutiny of the budget, no critique or questioning of the budget request by the board.” 

Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish abstained from voting on the budget at the November board meeting and joined her colleagues at the time in thanking the Chief for his work, without questioning how the figures were reached or exactly what the public’s money would be spent on, beyond the new staffing numbers which did not have details about how those numbers were decided on using detailed analysis.

Parrish then resigned from the board and became more vocal about her issues with the budget, publicly stating it is not sustainable and too much of a burden for many taxpayers already struggling with the high cost of living, joining her Mississauga colleagues on Peel Regional Council who took issue with the excessive budget demand.

Ultimately, under the CSPA, it is the police board that is responsible for considering and approving the budget before sending it to the municipality. The Region can then decline the request and send it back to the police services board to make amendments. 

But any revisions to the proposed budget for 2025 were swiftly dismissed after a majority of Peel’s elected officials (the Mississauga members and one Caledon councillor) voted to send the request back to the police services board for review (Brampton’s members voted against the move). 

The effort aimed to reduce the impact on residents who are already facing financial hardship on several fronts. 

The two-page letter that returned from the police board — the same day the motion was presented at the Region to send the budget back — rejected the request and appeared to be crafted before regional councillors held their vote. 

Mississauga Councillor Brad Butt, who introduced the motion to review the budget alongside Councillor Joe Horneck, previously told The Pointer he “was shocked” by how quickly the request was turned down. Should council continue to oppose the budget there is an option to vote against it which would trigger a mediation or arbitration process. But councillors have already indicated they hope to avoid that route. The Region’s budget process has been put on hold until the new year after Mississauga councillors walked out on the final scheduled meeting before the Christmas break.

In the letter to the Region rejecting the request to review the budget, the police board’s finance chair Al Boughton said the proposed increase could not be scaled back “without jeopardizing immediate public safety in Peel Region or the Board’s statutory mandate under the Community Safety and Policing Act (CSPA) to ensure adequate and effective policing.” The letter suggested that without the additional funding, and the 300 new officers proposed for next year, the force will not be able to provide the “adequate and effective” policing it is required to under the recently amended version of the Province’s Police Services Act. 

The letter, similar to Peel police’s budget process itself, failed to provide any financial analysis or evidence to justify how this increase in police spending — bringing the total operating budget alone for PRP to just under $750 million (a more than $130 million increase from 2024) — would result in a safer region. It also contradicted previous statements from the service earlier this year that Peel “continues to be one of the safest communities in Canada.”

Former Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee says he was “flabbergasted” by the size of the proposed increase to the Peel police budget for 2025.

(Alok Mukherjee/X) 

When he saw the size of the increase, Mississauga resident Wayne Johnson said he considered moving away from the city for the first time in his life. The increase, he said, was "astonishing."

“For me, as a citizen, it's a deep disappointment in the police. It's a deep disappointment in the municipal and provincial political process that allows taxation without representation,” Johnson told The Pointer. 

He delegated to regional council in November following the Chief’s presentation of the budget, and said that after sitting through the three-and-a-half-hour presentation, which was attended by dozens of uniformed police officers, there was not a single member of the force in the chambers behind him when he sat down to make his delegation. 

“I was actually insulted that not a single police member stayed until I started speaking and someone on the staff at the Region ran out and got a couple policemen to come in,” he said. “It's an issue that a budget was presented for three-and-a-half-hours, and then when comments came up, the police all left. They didn't even wait for the members of council to make their comments, let alone citizens.”

“We've got a situation here… where the police services board of the various municipalities, where no one knows who they are and it's very hard to find out information about them, [goes] and makes the decisions with no input or no responsibility, no accountability to either the elected officials or to the community.”

“We’re being taxed and there's no representation. As a citizen, it's the sense of hopelessness.”

Given the increases in recent years to policing in Peel, Mukherjee said he is “quite concerned" that conversations following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 are now being shut down. Unelected officials have more control over police budgets while strategies to shift police funding toward social programs that best address the root causes of crime, rather than more officers, to develop a preventive approach to community safety and wellness are now being reversed. 

“We are no longer talking about other ways of ensuring community safety, investing in other programs. Instead, we are seeing significant increases in police budgets, and there's a culture in policing where police services and police associations establish increases in one policing jurisdiction and then replicate it broadly,” he said. “So my concern is how this will embolden police chiefs elsewhere, who are right now seeking increases. Will this embolden them? 

“This budget threatens to set a precedent for all other police services. So we might see this to be the beginning of a trend that we must accept.”

At the rate Peel’s police budget has been increasing over the last five years, Mukherjee said it will not be long before the Region is staring at a billion dollar budget. He underlined police forces need to start controlling their costs by finding other ways of ensuring community safety while reducing increases to police spending.  

“The plain fact is that the municipalities’ capacity to increase their revenues is limited. Much of the revenue comes from property tax, so either they will have to impose significant increases in property tax, or they'll have to cut other programs, public transit, social services, housing, public health, you name it,” Mukherjee said. “And those to me, and I'm not alone, there's been extensive writing, those are essential components of building safe and healthy communities, not just policing.” 

The police services board brought Chief Duraiappah into the role in late 2019 as an agent of change for a troubled police organization that had lost the trust of residents it was supposed to serve. At the time, the Chief said his vision extended far out from 2020 and involved a complete restructuring of how the police force operates both inside and out. Following the death of George Floyd, which forced police forces to rethink how they ensure community safety, Duraiappah assured the community that his organization was ready and willing to institute change. At the time he said “the need for other systems to be strengthened in order to get upstream and mitigate risk so that we’re not the one in crisis response, is absolutely the solution.” 

But his tone has since changed. The latest budget strays from these “upstream” approaches the chief has promised and instead reverts back to previous status quo thinking from the chief’s predecessors who believed adding more officers would solve crime, when in fact, data shows that is not the case. 

“It appears that conversation and exploration of those new directions have both sort of run their course,” Mukherjee said. “That is my concern, is that we are going back and we are relying on the police more and more to deal with issues of policy and political decision making.”

As a long time resident of Mississauga, Johnson shares the same concerns. 

“When we as a society only invest in a response to a problem, it will never change anything,” he said. “If you want to see any change in [Peel] you have to have a mindset change, so you have to address the root causes. You have to invest at the grassroots level, and when the Region of Peel is putting 41 times more money into prevention, etc, it doesn't help the grassroots problems.”

“As a citizen, I look and say, ‘we're investing in the wrong thing.’ There's no doubt that you want to do something about auto thefts. But the problem is, the cops don't even show up for 48 hours after the car has been stolen.”

When asked by councillors during budget deliberations in November for more data and analysis to justify the need for 300 more officers in one year, Chief Duraiappah admitted there is little evidence to support his plan, stating, “Sometimes it's a bit like snake oil. It may not actually be the real litmus test of, ‘are you serving the community appropriately based on its need?’” 

Chief Duraiappah’s approach to policing has shifted since stepping into the role to effect change for a police force that had for years been underserving the community.

(Peel Regional Police) 

Data from PRP show this status quo approach of pouring more funding into policing is clearly not working. An analysis of the police service’s solvency rates for all types of crime in Brampton and Mississauga shows that while the force has received more money and more officers every year since 2019, its ability to solve these crimes has gotten worse, The Pointer previously reported. 

Numerous studies outside of Peel have pointed out that there is no correlation between pouring more money into police organizations (most of which goes to hiring more officers) and reductions in crime. A study of local police funding published in 2023 analyzed the budgets and crime rates of Canada’s 20 largest municipalities between 2010 and 2021, including Peel, and found no consistent correlation between increased police spending and a reduction in criminal activity. 

The Toronto Police Service previously introduced a hiring freeze (it has since been lifted) after the force’s budget rose to more than $1 billion annually in effort to alleviate the financial burden on the municipality and its taxpayers, Mukherjee pointed out. During that time, it forced the police service to rethink how officers were deployed and pivot to new ways of policing. Despite a decrease in the size of the force, crime rates remained relatively steady.  

Melanie Seabrook, a researcher at the University of Toronto and lead author of the 2023 study of police spending, previously told The Pointer there is growing evidence that shows investing in social services that keep people housed and healthy is a far better pathway to reducing crime. She highlighted the evidence demonstrates that “socio-economic insecurity is a predictor of crime rates” and shows the need for other support systems, such as social services, housing and education.

“New weapons, new technologies, new helicopters, hundreds of new police officers and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will not solve the issues that people care the most about, housing, food security, employment, healthcare and safety,” David Bosveld, who has consistently pushed for reform within the police force, told The Pointer. He added that, “If a fraction of the increase to the police budget was shifted to upstream resources I believe that would be more impactful and create a safer community.” 

Bosveld, who called the historic increase “an outlier across the province,” stressed “the board, and the chief are taking advantage of a political environment that is extremely pro-police. This approach ignores research and assumes incorrectly that more police and more arrests will make people and communities safer.”

Mukherjee told The Pointer that the increase speaks to “a certain laziness of thinking and the falling back on the same old way of doing things; that all you need to do is increase the size of the force and the city will be safer. That we know from any number of reliable studies is utter nonsense, and yet it seems that nobody in the board is bothered, other than the [Mississauga] Mayor.”

The increase, which has been heavily criticized, led to the resignation of Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish from the police board in late November over her inability to oppose the unprecedented increase.

Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish resigned from the police services board in November to voice her opposition to the increase proposed for the year ahead.

(The Pointer files) 

In a recent interview with journalist Desmond Cole, who has advocated for police reform, Parrish criticized the police budget and how it is handled. She voiced concern around the absence of line by line presentations showing where spending is being directed and the lack of numbers that show the money the Region’s elected officials have been approving year-over-year are actually achieving anything. 

Upon being appointed to the board, Parrish revealed that one of the first things “They tell you is…don’t…criticize the board, one of the things you don’t do is when you leave the board room, you never talk about what happened in there and one of the other things that you pledge to do is to protect their privacy and the way it operates.” 

“The difficulty is the police board itself is a close knit club and when they make a decision, nobody deviates… it's not being accountable to the public,” she added. In order to keep her commitments to the board, Parrish resigned to freely voice her opposition to the scale of the increase. Her latest statements raise serious questions around the lack of transparency in the police services budget process.   

As the Region of Peel’s elected officials continue to roll over and direct more funding toward police spending, it means less money for other services that are desperately needed such as housing, which a staff report recently revealed the Region is falling further behind on. Room for spending on other regional services that are already desperately underfunded will be shrunk as the PRP budget continues to receive substantial increases each budget year.

“[Duraiappah] has created the conditions in which he can get away with asking for such huge increases and not be questioned,” Mukherjee said. “Police officers, police leaders, have said to me they can always use more money. They can always use more boots on the ground. They will never say no, and you open the doors, and they will ask for more. But it is those who are ultimately responsible and accountable for allowing that to happen who should be questioned.”

“It's becoming a common problem of effective government, common inability to exercise reports, fiduciary responsibility, legal responsibility,” he added. “But Peel stands out because of the magnitude of increase that they're approving without questions, no study, no backup, no documentation, no analysis, no audit, just the chief's word of mouth. That’s scandalous.”

Email: [email protected] 

Twitter: @mcpaigepeacock

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